Language of the Land Project ESSAYS ABOUT HUBERT H. HUMPHREY THE
HUMPHREY FORUM Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs University of
Minnesota 301-19th Avenue South Minneapolis, MN 55455 Director:
Stephen Sandell Telephone: (612) 624-5893 The Humphrey Forum is
an exhibit of twentieth-century government and politics. Through
both its museum and publishing programs, the Forum offers a
chance to explore Minnesota's political landscape through the
work of historians, journalists, educators, and others. The Forum
offers museum lessons for elementary and secondary students;
publishes a current affairs classroom newspaper, Nineteenth
Avenue; and sponsors a variety of public programs that encourage
the active and creative practice of citizenship. The exhibit
features the work of three political essayists: Harlan Cleveland,
statesman, author, and former dean of the Humphrey Institute;
Lance Morrow, senior essayist at Time magazine; and Marc Pachter,
historian at the Smithsonian Institution. The essay is perhaps
one of literature's most neglected forms. The map of Minnesota's
literary heritage would be incomplete without examples of
political and historical essays, and who better for the
essayist's subject than our most venerated political figure,
Hubert H. Humphrey. The text of a recent collection of essays,
entitled Hubert H. Humphrey: A Public Man, is included in full on
this CD-ROM. Other books and essays about Hubert Humphrey, his
life, and politics include: Hubert Humphrey, by Carl Solberg (New
York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1984). The Education of a Public
Man: My Life in Politics, by Hubert H. Humphrey (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1991). "The Legacy of Hubert
Humphrey," a collection of five essays on Hubert H. Humphrey in
Perspectives on Political Science, Winter 1992, volume 21, number
1.
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Hubert H. Humphrey A Public Man Essays from The Humphrey Forum
Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs University of
Minnesota Three essays were commissioned in 1988 for The Humphrey
Forum at the University of Minnesota's Hubert H. Humphrey
Institute of Public Affairs. Harlan Cleveland, international
statesman and former dean of the Humphrey Institute, wrote about
justice, freedom, human dignity, and self-expression as the
recurring themes of Humphrey's public life. Lance Morrow, senior
essayist at Time magazine, drew on elements of Humphrey's career
to describe American culture in the twentieth century. Historian
Marc Pachter of the Smithsonian Institution wrote the main
exhibit text, a biography based on Humphrey's personal and
political philosophy. The essays provide a narration to the
photographs, objects, chronology, and documents in the exhibit.
This booklet offers excerpts of each essay for your enjoyment.
THE BUSINESS OF CITIZENSHIP "If you care about what happens, you
must be prepared to get in the middle of the fight. You cannot
afford to let someone else make all the decisions. This
government is your business. It's everybody's business. I
challenge you to get to work."-HHH Hubert Humphrey's character
was profoundly American. As a man formed by the Great Depression
and the New Deal's response to it, Humphrey helped to shape the
tradition of strong, active government as a protector of
individual rights. In Humphrey's vocabulary, the "bad" words were
hatred, bigotry, poverty, injustice, violence, bitterness,
indifference. The "good" words were compassion, humanism, social
consciousness, justice, freedom, progress. In Humphrey's
pragmatic activism, government was a vehicle-the only available
vehicle, it seemed-to carry Americans out of ignorance and
poverty and injustice and bear them into brighter territories.
Big government eventually acquired a bad name with many
Americans, came to seem intrusive, inefficient, excessively
bureaucratic and expensive. But that was a later counterpoint.
The tradition of government activism in which Humphrey worked had
long since accomplished a transformation in American life.
Leadership is a mystery. One can list its ingredients-personal
energy, vision, style, attention to detail, experience,
manipulative skills, and so on, and not penetrate its secret. It
is as various and difficult to define as love or music. Was
Hubert Humphrey a great leader? He had energy and vision. He
mobilized Americans' decencies and led them into political
battle. He thought that his greatest triumph came when he led the
battle for Senate passage of the 1964 Civil Rights
Act-legislation that transformed American life. Ironically, he
accomplished that great work by effacing himself as a leader and
coaxing others into the moral foreground. Of course, Humphrey
never achieved the ultimate leadership goal, the presidency.
After his defeat in the 1968 presidential election, he uttered a
line of pure American Humphrey: "There comes a time in your life
when it is good to be a plain citizen. I think being a citizen of
the United States of America is about as good a title as you can
get." Being a plain citizen was honor enough because the citizen
ultimately held the power, as long as he or she participated.
"Get into politics," Humphrey once urged college students. "Don't
just be cheering from the bleachers." For much of his political
career, Humphrey rode far in advance of his countrymen on such
subjects as civil rights. But he kept open the political and
moral lines of communication between himself and those he sought
to lead, those whom he would coax into higher territory. Those
lines of communication between the Johnson-Humphrey
administration and the American people broke down during the
Vietnam War, with disastrous results. In an almost mystical way,
Humphrey and his America were somehow coequal, and when American
politics turned toxic, Humphrey felt poisoned as well. At length,
he recovered his equilibrium and momentum. A few years before his
death, Humphrey discussed the genius of identification between
government and people: "The country that prides itself in
government of the people, by the people, and for the people must
speak like the people, must feel like the people, and must suffer
and experience the joy and exhilaration of the people."-LM
BELIEFS AND BEGINNINGS Everyone is born with a body, a mind, a
unique self-and a built-in obligation to cooperate with others.
That's one side of a bargain which makes it possible for all
groups in human society-families, neighborhoods, tribes, or
nations-to exist and continue, change and flourish. The other
side of that same bargain obligates each society to help all its
people to do their best while still respecting individual needs
and differences. Human dignity is both the product of that
agreement as well as its priceless ingredient.-HC "We have the
chance, we have the obligation, to create the New World our
forefathers talked of and sought...a world not new in its
principalities and kingdoms, nor in the glory of its monuments
and its armies, but a world new in this final achievable
reality...that each child might enter human society with the
right to health, with the right to education, with the right to
hope, the right to free expression and the right to human
opportunity, because we of this generation willed that it be
so."-HHH If someone held a contest for "most independent-minded
place" in the country, South Dakota would compete for top honors.
The citizens of that rural Upper Midwest state have always shown
how deep our national passion for self-reliance can go. Hubert
Humphrey was born into that place and that feeling. All around
him he saw people who didn't want government to do them any
favors. What you got, you worked for; what you didn't get, you
didn't need or deserve. But even people who depend on themselves
can be knocked for a loop. Things can happen that you can't
control or even expect. And they did happen in the 1920s and
1930s when crops died and hopes died and the finances of the
whole nation went into a tailspin. Humphrey learned then, that
try as they might to get on in life, people sometimes needed
help. It might be the economy, it might be their family's
poverty, it might be the color of their skin. Independence was
everyone's right; but it wasn't always everyone's reality.
Helping your neighbors is an old tradition in America. We could
never have survived on the frontier without it. Humphrey didn't
see much difference between that tradition and government help.
It was just a way to tackle community problems too big for family
and church to solve. Humphrey knew that his opponents thought he
went too far in his reliance on government. But he found it hard
to understand their mistrust of federal solutions. Government was
a tool for him, not something good in itself. It was a way of
getting people fed, clothed, housed, and cared for if they could
not provide all this for themselves. But, just as important, it
was a way to get them moving, unstuck. Hunger robbed people of
dignity, but so did their inability to take care of themselves,
to shape their own futures. Humphrey never seemed to grow tired
of government as a solution to whatever ailed America. Though he
grew up during a period when his country was first learning to
use big government as a way to fight hard times and injustice, by
his last years, in the 1970s, many Americans were beginning to
think things had gone too far in Washington. All around he heard
that big government and big taxes were luxuries the country could
no longer afford. Unshackle the economy, the critics argued, and
let it do the job without federal bureaucrats tinkering like the
bad mechanics they were. Humphrey called this "political bunkum."
He thought only big government could stand up against selfish
interests and guarantee all Americans a fair shake. But what was
a fair shake? In his career, Humphrey and fellow liberals had
wanted to guarantee food, housing, and civil rights among basic
needs. By the 1970s he was arguing that a decent job was owed as
well. In the last major legislation of his life, the
Humphrey-Hawkins bill, he worked to commit the federal government
to a low unemployment rate even if there were consequences for
taxation. The issue was jobs, not taxes. But the times were
changing. Even many liberals began to feel too much was asked of
government. Only a watered down version of Humphrey's full
employment bill was passed, just after its sponsor's death. The
era of Hubert Humphrey had come to an end. The era of Ronald
Reagan was about to begin.-M POLITICS AND PERSEVERANCE Beyond
your role in society-butcher, baker, candlestick maker-you are
also yourself. So you can't avoid the elemental questions: Why am
I here? What do I want? What am I trying to do about it? Certain
felt needs are universal and common to us all, basic to living a
life filled with spirit. We want to live a life of dignity with
food and shelter, education, work, and security. We want to feel
a sense of achievement, to be "somebody" and accomplish something
worth doing. We want to be treated fairly in reference to others,
to feel a sense of belonging. And we need to have a sense of
participating in decisions that affect our own destiny.-HC "The
Kennedys flew in their private Convair, the Caroline. We chugged
about in an old, slow, cold, rented bus...I would frequently
stretch out on a cot, reporters interviewing me as we rolled from
town to town, all of us half freezing and uncomfortable. Once, as
we started into the darkness of the rural countryside, I heard a
plane overhead. On my cot, bundled in layers of uncomfortable
clothes, both chilled and sweaty, I yelled: "Come down here,
Jack, and play fair."-HHH Politicians work in a rough and tumble
world where interests compete, and power shifts, and ideals
collide with reality. But good things can happen through
politics, and no one knew that more than Hubert Humphrey. What he
wanted for Americans and for others throughout the world he
shouted from the mountaintops-and then worked for it in the
trenches, one spadeful at a time. If national acclaim, good
intentions, and hard work had been enough, Hubert Humphrey would
have been the top new senator of 1949. He had it all-a great
record as mayor of Minneapolis, the spotlight as a spokesman for
civil rights, and the cover of Time. Confident enough to warn the
tired old Senate not to get in his way, the thirty-seven-year-old
called the seniority system "the most sacred cow in the
legislative zoo," and aimed a tough speech at powerful Senator
Harry Byrd of Virginia. This was brave, but not very smart. In
spite of the fact that Humphrey worked fast and furiously that
first term-introducing fifty-seven bills, seventeen amendments,
and five resolutions-not a single bill he sponsored his first
four years was passed. That did it. "I'm going to learn to do it
their way," he told a friend. There was no one moment when Hubert
Humphrey learned the Senate ropes. It took time to figure out how
committees worked and what made everyone tick. He could be
patient now, offering the same bill year after year in new ways,
with new twists, until he wore his opponents down. And he did
wear them down. The man who used to "spout off" never did lose
his reputation for gabbiness. But now he could negotiate, too,
giving in once in a while to move ahead. "If I believe in
something," he said, "I will fight for it with all I have. But I
do not demand all or nothing. I would rather get something than
nothing." He was open-minded about his friends, too, making new
ones like Lyndon Johnson, the Democratic leader during his second
term. Johnson was no passionate reformer. But the two men hit it
off anyway. Humphrey saw Johnson as a link to the southerners who
ruled the Senate. And Johnson saw Humphrey, he enjoyed telling
one reporter, "as my link to the bomb-throwers." The Texan even
got in the habit of calling the Minnesota liberal every evening
to compare notes. There was no doubt about it, Hubert Humphrey
had joined the club. Soon he would rewrite the rules. With his
incredible energy, his passion for detail, and his stubborn hold
on a vision for America, he made himself chief trailblazer in
President Kennedy's New Frontier. Ideas of his that had seemed
impossible dreams only a year before, like a Peace Corps for
America's youth, now were taken up by the young president and
pushed through by Humphrey. He was at the White House just about
every day, taking and offering advice. In the Senate he learned
to twist arms, do favors, and deliver votes. He never denied that
he enjoyed power, but he knew why he wanted it, too-in order to
change the way a small group of senators had been able to stop
civil rights legislation. When the New Frontier became the Great
Society after the tragic death of President Kennedy, Humphrey was
there as a connecting link. The man who wanted to be president
would never reach that goal. But what he achieved as master
legislator left America forever changed.-MP FIGHTING AND FAIR
PLAY Justice is not law it's fairness. But it's law, guided by
fairness, that creates a just society. A just society will judge
people as people, not as categories. Law should ensure that each
person is judged on the same basis as any other person in the
same situation would be judged. Much of the world's injustice
results from treating people not as individuals but as
categories, bracketing their uniqueness in a class, a sex, a
religious persuasion, a racial heritage, an ethnic group. Yet
fairness requires each of us to be considered first of all as
ourselves. It's a tough lesson.-HC "...when we say, 'One nation
under God, with liberty and justice for all,' we are talking
about all people. We either ought to believe it or quit saying
it..."-HHH Minnesota's not perfect. But most people believe that
it has always had a good record on human rights. Most people are
wrong. In the mid-1940s, just about the time Hubert Humphrey was
taking up his duties as mayor of Minneapolis, a national magazine
called this city "the capitol of anti- semitism." And it was.
Humphrey later remembered that the situation "was so bad that a
Jew could not even join the Automobile Association." How do you
change the practices of an entire city? The way Hubert Humphrey
would always do things-one step at a time. If the citizens of
Minneapolis were ever going to break their habits of prejudice,
first they would have to recognize what they were doing. With a
nice touch, the mayor hired a group of students from Fisk, a
black university in Nashville, Tennessee to help Minneapolis
conduct a self-survey of its attitudes. Then, while the results
of the survey sunk in, he turned to the police. He suspended a
patrolman for making anti-Jewish remarks and hired a new chief to
start the country's first human relations program for police. And
that was just the start. The mayor appointed a Council on Human
Relations with a key goal in mind. By January of 1947 he had
achieved it, the nation's first Municipal Fair Employment
Practice Commission (with text by a young lawyer named Orville
Freeman). It didn't take long for the message to go around the
city and then around the country. Here was a politician who meant
what he said. Sometimes you just have to take a stand. Humphrey's
moment, perhaps his finest, came at the Democratic National
Convention in the summer of 1948. The party had danced around the
issue of civil rights for years, principally out of fear of
getting the southerners angry. They argued that the right of
states not to have their laws interfered with by the federal
government was the most critical right to protect. President
Harry Truman had a good record on civil rights, but wanted party
unity in a tough election year, and a statement on civil rights
that didn't promise too much-a "magnificent weasel," one reporter
called it. His supporters warned that if Humphrey and his allies
rocked the boat by asking for a strong stand, the party would
split and go down to defeat on election day. Through the boiling
hot days and nights, the Humphrey forces fought for a stronger
plank on civil rights in the party platform. This did not please
the men in charge. First he was a called a "pipsqueak;" then,
when he wanted to push the fight to the floor of the convention,
in full view of the nation, some thought him a party traitor. It
was a tough decision, and at first he wavered. But in the final
hours, Humphrey knew he would have to do it. All his life Hubert
Humphrey would be known for his love of talk. "Minnesota Chats,"
they called him. But on one critical afternoon in July of 1948,
as he rose before a packed convention, he knew he had less than
ten minutes to move a party and a nation to new beginnings. The
deck was stacked against him. Convention organizers had squeezed
his motion for a stronger civil rights plank in with three by
southerners for an even weaker position. The best estimate of how
the delegates would vote left him far short of the support he
would need. Then he spoke. In his high, sure voice he praised
Truman for the courage he had shown as president in support of
civil rights. It was that courage he now asked of his party.
"There are those who say to you-we are rushing this issue of
civil rights. I say we are a hundred and seventy-two years late."
States' rights was no true issue for the Democratic Party. It was
time to leave its shadow "and walk forthrightly into the bright
sunshine of human rights." The convention exploded. "It was the
greatest speech I ever heard," one delegate remembered. By the
time order had been restored and a vote taken, a political
miracle had happened. The motion was carried 651-1/2 to 582-1/2,
and the Democratic Party would never be the same.-MP THE PURSUIT
OF PEACE Freedom is not a "system." It's a protected plurality of
systems, a daily celebration of variety. As members of a free
society, we hold in our heads two contrasting ideas: That it's OK
to disagree with each other, and that we have to work together.
And we shouldn't be bashful about trying to export this
preference for variety. A recognition of diversity should be our
perspective on the world and the heart of U.S. foreign policy. A
pluralistic world with room for many cultures, protected in going
their self-selected ways and induced to leave their neighbors
alone-it won't be a comfortable world. But Americans should
recognize the terrain. Diversity is where we come from.-HC "Peace
is not passive, it is active. Peace is not appeasement, it is
strength. Peace does not 'happen,' it requires work."-HHH Being
friendly with the Russians was not something that most American
politicans made a habit of in the 1950s. And Humphrey himself was
not too sentimental about Russian goals for the world. But he
could never buy arguments that the Russians were so different
from Americans that we could barely understand them, much less
trust them. They were people. You could talk to them. And he
found a fine way to prove it. In December 1958, on a trip to
Moscow for background information, he was told suddenly that if
he could get to the Kremlin in half an hour, the Soviet leader
Nikita Krushchev would see him. This was new. Very few Americans,
particularly of Humphrey's rank, had gotten the chance to size up
Krushchev. They might have just had some polite chitchat. But the
two really hit it off-talker to talker. Nearly eight-and-a-half
hours later, Humphrey emerged into the Moscow night, startled and
exhilarated. Conversation had been frank. There was still a very
long way to go in Soviet-American dialogue. But still, Krushchev
had been willing to admit some failings in his system. And he
wanted President Eisenhower to invite him to the United States
for a visit. The meeting made headlines around the world.
Ex-miner and former pharmacist had found some common ground. They
even shared a few jokes. The cold war was a little less cold. The
dance of disarmament, first a few steps forward then a few steps
backward, went on for years between the two super powers after
Humphrey put it on the Senate's agenda in 1956. A number of
things had to happen before there was any chance of real
progress. For one thing, both sides in the cold war had to really
want to reduce the stockpiling of arms. Then, technology had to
be good enough to find out if the other guy was cheating. It took
a while, but by the early 1960s conditions were right. It wasn't
that peace suddenly broke out. Far from it. The United States and
the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics came terrifyingly close
to nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Maybe
some arms control was necessary. Humphrey was ready. He had
persuaded President Kennedy to establish an Arms Control Agency
in 1961. Also, he had gotten quite specific in his goals: not
arms reduction-not yet-but a ban on nuclear tests; and not
underground tests-not yet-but tests in the air, in space, and
underwater. Then he got a resolution out of the Senate announcing
that we were ready to talk. So were the Russians. In 1963 nearly
100 nations signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the first
breakthrough in the control of nuclear arms. "Hubert, this is
yours," John Kennedy said at the signing ceremony. "I hope it
works."-MP VIETNAM AND THE VICE-PRESIDENCY Dissent without
disruption is not an easy mix. We keep re-learning the lesson
that the best and most durable way to manage our public and
international business is the undogmatic, unsystematic,
loose-reined, checked and balanced, part public-part private
state of affairs we call democracy. We still are learning to
distrust the idea that any one person's, or group's, view of
society is the correct, approved, authorized version. The one
essential thing about democracy we're discovering is that no one
individual or group gets to say, with authority, what democracy
is. -HC "I believe that history will show that what came out of
1968 was good for America...Those kids...blew the whistle on our
use of power as the main instrument in our international
affairs."-HHH Sometimes things just don't work out. Humphrey's
friendship with Lyndon Johnson was the cornerstone of his
successful Senate career. It was Johnson as vice president who
had offered Humphrey the position of Senate Majority Whip. When
Johnson then offered his old ally the vice- presidential slot in
1964, it seemed like the culmination of a partnership. It turned
out to be no partnership at all. Vice presidents are not the
equal of presidents. They are asked to wait and to follow. It's a
tough position to be in. And Johnson made it tougher. He reminded
Humphrey daily who the boss was. And when his vice president
dared, early in the administration, to question our involvement
in Vietnam, Johnson froze him out of high level meetings for a
year. Humphrey couldn't stand it. He believed in loyalty and
decided in the end that an effective relationship with Johnson
was critical. The president's war became his war as well. He
needed to believe in it. And when Humphrey believed in something
he went all out. The two men were united again-and so were their
political futures. Johnson was denied a second term in the White
House. And Humphrey never made it there at all. It should have
been the greatest day in his life when Hubert Humphrey accepted
his party's nomination for the presidency in the summer of 1968.
But there was a price to pay. He was the candidate of a bitterly
divided party torn over the Vietnam War. Outside, on the streets
of Chicago, the police ran riot over scores of young protesters
shouting down his name. Twenty years before, in 1948, he had been
the one leading a revolt in his party-to put civil rights on the
national agenda. Now, in a turnabout, his people were the ones
working to put down a rebellion in the party ranks, as they
fought to overwhelm an anti-Vietnam War plank movement. When he
went on to the campaign, Humphrey put his fabulous energy and
unstoppable optimism to the test. Moving away from Johnson's
pro-war policy, he began to recapture the voters he had been
identified with through most of his career. And he came
heartbreakingly close to victory-only 500,000 short in the
popular vote. But it was a loss for all that. Richard Nixon was
president of the United States. And a bruised Humphrey returned
to his roots in Minnesota. Hubert Humphrey was no philosopher at
heart. He was hands-on, a practical politican who tried to see
what needed to be done and do it. So he never came up with an
overall theory of what went wrong for America in Vietnam, or even
what went wrong for Hubert Humphrey. He saw Vietnam as a key
issue for the late 1960s, but not the only one. He recognized
that our involvement in the war blew up in our faces. But at the
time, as he later said, "it was a responsible decision in the
light of the evidence." And yet something had obviously gone
wrong. "Like many things in our national life, we miscalculated,"
he reflected in 1974. "We overestimated our ability to control
events, which is one of the great dangers of a great power. Power
tends to be a substitute for judgment and wisdom." So we plunged
in and paid the price. But Humphrey was not the kind of person to
brood for America or for himself. "I think as a nation we came
through it all right. We learned something. I'm a born
optimist."-MP THE HUMPHREY SPIRIT Humphrey had an impressive
record in political life, no doubt. But what really impressed
everyone about him was his spirit: his unconquerable spirit. Some
people seem lucky from the moment they're born. Others-the rest
of us-have to earn everything they get. Hubert Humphrey was one
of those. The tough years during the Depression, the setbacks of
a political life were hurdles he had to jump. The final hurdle,
though, was the toughest. Starting with some painful therapy for
a pre-cancerous condition in the late 1960s through operations
for cancer in 1973 and 1976, he was up against a foe that would
not give up. But as his body gave way, his spirit held. That last
stretch he served in the Senate, from 1970 until his death in
January 1978, he wrote 42 bills and co-authored 135 others. It
was all for the better future for his nation, which he never lost
sight of whatever his own condition. His greatest message was to
the young: "You're needed. Take personal pride in something you
own, yourselves. You've had the experience of a new world. Share
it." This was a man who practiced what he preached.-MP Hubert H.
Humphrey Mayor of Minneapolis, 1945 to 1949 United States
Senator, 1949 to 1965 and 1971 to 1978 Vice President of the
United States, 1965 to 1969 The Humphrey Forum Hubert H. Humphrey
Institute of Public Affairs Univesity of Minnesota 301-19th
Avenue South Minneapolis, MN 55455 Copyright 1993 From the
Language of the Land Project CD-ROM Selection used with
permission of the author Copyright held by author